20 gallons’ worth of network security?

Posted on November 6, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

Saw this truck parked outside an office building in downtown Milwaukee last Friday morning. I don’t know what business these hats’ owner works in, but given the “white hats,” I figured network security was as good a guess as any 🙂

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The Highwaymen: “Highwayman”

Posted on November 5, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

I heard this song on the radio while driving home the other night. Here’s the Wikipedia article on The Highwaymen supergroup. Like some other songs I really like—for example, “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and “MacArthur Park”—this song was written by Jimmy Webb. Just thought I’d share 🙂

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Sunset in grays and pastels, downtown Milwaukee

Posted on November 4, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

Evening arrives this past Tuesday as I’m getting ready to leave work for the day. Taken from the staircase landing between the second and third floors of the Grohmann Museum looking west toward the Marcus Center (colored lights) and the Milwaukee County Courthouse (classical pillared building at right in the background).

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All the colors of the rainbow

Posted on November 3, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

The Reuss Federal Plaza (that horizontal sliver of cobalt blue at the center) kind of throws it in that direction anyway. Taken Thursday morning on my Starbucks run 🙂

Oh, gee, I was just checking to make sure I spelled Henry Reuss’s name correctly, and I discovered that the building was sold this past January. Article about the transaction is here. Well, no matter what it’s called in the future, I’m sure I’ll be 95 years old and still referring to it as it was originally known. Just like all the other downtown buildings that are no longer named what I call them!

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Warped Time

Posted on November 2, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

It’s fascinating to notice those weird moments when historical eras overlap. My husband, who is 10+ years older than I am, can remember seeing milk being delivered to homes in his neighborhood via horse-drawn wagons in the 1950s. Here is a cool, short oral-history video on horse-drawn milk wagons being used into the 1950s.

Dairies continued delivery with horses well into the 1960s if the anthropological record of The Andy Griffith Show can be trusted, which in 1967 featured an episode on the retirement of a dairy delivery horse (“Goodbye, Dolly,” IMDB plot summary here).

And speaking of 1967, I’m working on an academic article about movie trailers right now, and I’ve noticed “For What It’s Worth” popping up pretty frequently as a shorthand way to contextualize a film’s setting and mood as part of the late-1960s counterculture. From the twangy guitar pings of the song’s opening notes, viewers can instantly orient themselves to the feeling of that time/place in America.

And yet, this movie-trailer rhetoric is misleading. The music has created an identity that we assign to the era, and this identity is saturated with meanings we’ve attached to it. “For What It’s Worth” peaked on the Billboard chart at #7 on March 25, 1967.

So, BEFORE the “Summer of Love,” (which occurred in the summer of 1967; Wikipedia article HERE). BEFORE Woodstock (which occurred in August of 1969; Wikipedia article HERE).

Yet on October 12, 1968, a year and a half AFTER “For What It’s Worth” hit its peak on the Billboard chart, The Vogues also peaked at #7 with “My Special Angel.”

So strange! To think that a month and a half AFTER the protests/riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, this very un-1960s-counterculture and very square, circa-1950s-era song (Bobby Helms first recorded it in 1957) would break the Billboard chart’s top ten. Very disorienting!

Movies/media rarely capture the anachronisms that, without irony, inhabit the same physical and temporal spaces of an era. Truth is almost always stranger than fiction when you take the time to think about it.

Posted in History, Life, Movies and film, Music, Popular culture, Television | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

War of the Worlds – Fake News! About Fake News!

Posted on October 31, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

So 80 years ago at Halloween time, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre of the Air broadcast the historic War of the Worlds radio drama that set off a nationwide panic at the (fake!) news of Martians landing in New Jersey and launching an attack on Americans.

Although UK newspaper The Telegraph claimed in an article two years ago that reports of widespread panic were a myth (fake news about fake news!), I personally give way more credence to the reporting done on the scene by the United Press International (UPI) on the actual night of the broadcast itself, October 30, 1938 (click here to link to the archived article on the UPI’s website). And here’s a Washington Post article from October 30, 1968, marking thirty years on from that broadcast and associated panic.

According to that UPI report, people in New Jersey fled their homes in the immediate aftermath of the show’s announcement that areas nearby had been gas-bombed by the aliens. The Newark, New Jersey, police department received 2,000 phone calls within an hour of the radio show’s initial reports of the attack. And because people in New Jersey were calling their relatives across the country to warn them of the Martians’ invasion—and this was in the era of really expensive long-distance telephone rates, so imagine the significance of such a phone call on the receiving end—the panic spread quickly beyond New Jersey and the East Coast. And because all of those relatives in Kansas and elsewhere began calling their local authorities to get more news (because no Twitter, Facebook, or TELEVISION!), the fake news about fake news prompted even more generation of fake news. With devastating effect: According to the UPI article, at least two heart attacks and a stroke in Tulsa, Oklahoma, were attributed directly to the radio show.

I remember listening to a rebroadcast of The War of the Worlds right around Halloween when I was a child. Actually, now that I think about it, I imagine it was probably around Halloween in 1968, which would have been the 30th anniversary of the original broadcast. Listening to that rebroadcast was fascinating and marvelous, and I felt somehow privileged that I was able to experience this historic event for myself. It was like a time-machine connection to the 1930s, especially with the broadcast  interrupted by the news of invasion being a show featuring the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra coming to us live from “The Meridian Room” of the Hotel Park Plaza in New York.

It was especially interesting to see how the news story developed. From the initial observation of an atmospheric disturbance somewhere over Nova Scotia (I think it was) to the first reports coming in from New Jersey to, finally, all hell breaking loose and basically full-out war between the Martian invaders and us.

I found the complete broadcast on YouTube, uploaded by someone named David Webb, who has a YouTube channel devoted mostly to musicians from his hometown of Basingstoke in southern England. (Thank you, Mr. Webb!)

Enjoy 🙂

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Buses, Buses Everywhere

Posted on October 30, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

A kid-friendly production must be happening at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts right now. On my Starbucks run this morning I saw at least 13-15 school buses total parked along Kilbourn, State, and both sides of Water. You might have to enlarge the photo to see them all, and even then there are even more you can get only glimpses of beyond the buses in the center. Weren’t field trips the best?!!!

 

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Changes at MSOE – A snapshot of the old and the (very) new

Posted on October 29, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

Walking back to my office from the scholarship luncheon today (a really nice event where MSOE scholarship sponsors and recipients get to meet over a meal), I noticed the old Blatz Brewing Company logo atop MSOE’s Alumni Partnership Center.

The Alumni Partnership Center once served as the company offices for the Valentin Blatz Brewing Co., and the building still contains several walk-in safes and other remnants of its days as a major brewery’s headquarters. I’m in that building a few times a year, mostly in connection with MSOE’s Great Books events, but I never have occasion to see it from across the street. So today I noticed for the first time how the old Blatz logo contains

  1. The “Brauerstern” (brewer’s star)
  2. The initials “V” and “B” entwined
  3. A hop flower (beneath the V and B)
  4. A sheaf of barley (across the top)

Cool to see! Here’s a closeup showing that same basic symbol on an old Blatz label.

So anyway, the Blatz logo is obviously the “old” in today’s post. The “new” is the huge crane that dominated most of the MSOE landscape across the street from where I stood. That crane is part of the construction project that will eventually result in MSOE’s Dwight and Dian Diercks Computational Science Hall, which will house the school’s new AI program. Very exciting! (My photo below is about half a “panorama” shot, hence the weirdly bent street . . . )

 

Posted in architecture, Food, Higher education, History, Milwaukee, Photography | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

The impact of “small” differences

Posted on October 26, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

I happened to look up as I was walking into the Red Arrow Starbucks this morning, and I saw a photo. I took a couple pictures but can’t decide which of these I like best. They’re practically the same, just taken from slightly different angles and therefore having slightly different compositions.

I think maybe I prefer the first one, because I like the upward-jutting angle of the cement and railing of the plaza above and the way it dominates the lower half and foreground of the picture.

But I’m including my second photo, too. Taken from slightly farther away and therefore from a shallower angle, it doesn’t emphasize the concrete’s angle so much. I also like the colors here better. The gray-blue sky sort of changes the way I perceive the office building. It’s features seem softer and more monochromatic, with less contrast among the different colors. The overall effect is more calm than the first photo. Where the first photo feels darker, more dynamic and bold, somehow the second feels lighter, more peaceful and quiet.

Here they are side by side for easier comparison. Each has different arguments in its favor. Maybe there’s no clear “best” choice. But since I find myself mired in indecision, I thought I’d throw the question out to you. Which do you like best?

 

 

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Gaining clarity from a second look around

Posted on October 23, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

So about three weeks ago I posted this photo:

One of the things I liked about it was the crisscrossed bands of shadows across the lawn. I assumed it came from the sun shining through the mall of trees on the hillside. But yesterday I realized I was wrong about the source of light and shadow. It was actually reflected from the office building’s windows above.

My teaching/learning takeaway? It pays to see things from multiple vantage points, including temporal. And it also helps not to make idle assumptions 🙂  As you can see in this photo, the trees are still thick with leaves, so the sun could not have cast crisscrossed lines of shadow through them, something I’d have realized if I’d paused to look around more and take in the entire scene.

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